Daily Drafts & Dialogues

Can you write great work without challenging your own beliefs?

K. E. Creighton — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:00:52 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Thanks for joining this week’s dialogue about the stories we tell ourselves!

I’m glad you’ve joined us for this week’s dialogue. We have a lot to unpack and plenty to discuss as we continue to explore The Stories We Tell Ourselves.

This month, we’ve been writing Drafts, reading Books, and engaging in Dialogues to discover and understand as much as we can when answering one big question: Why do certain stories stay with us? Which, so far, has only surfaced more questions worth unpacking.

Last week we took a deep dive into The Art of Autofiction, as we discussed Memory and Storytelling over the course of the week, which revealed some interesting insights on how an increasing number of writers are choosing to walk the line between fact and fiction as they write about themselves and their lives in today’s always-on online world. And the week before that we asked ourselves: Can a book genuinely change who we are?, ultimately deciding that it can, albeit with a few conditions, which prompted us to delve into The Anatomy of Books That Have Changed Us.

This week, I want to keep moving our conversation forward by asking a question that many writers likely struggle with at some point as they continue to navigate both conscious and sometimes invisible boundaries that shape their work.

Many of us know that our beliefs often work behind the scenes shaping the narratives we construct about our personal histories, the people around us, and the world we live in. But how often do we actively challenge those beliefs in our writing, assuming we’re aware of them when they surface in our writing or as we’re writing? And how often do we ask ourselves whether challenging, not necessarily changing, those beliefs is to the integrity and longevity of our work and whether that work is ultimately regarded as ‘great’?

Today’s dialogue question requires a deeper level of intentional self-reflection, as it prompts us to navigate uncomfortable terrain and radical honesty with ourselves as we consider those beliefs that truly influence what we write and why. It also forces us to explore whether those beliefs ultimately align with our ‘great writing’ ideals and aspirations, which won’t necessarily be easy to deconstruct let alone face head-on. Nevertheless, here we are, curious and eager to better understand what makes us and our writing tick so that we can intentionally write what we want, how we want, when we want, and why we want. Which should yield its own reward, I hope.

As you consider the information in the responses to the dialogue drafted below, please encourage yourself to keep an open mind and adopt an attitude of radical yet compassionate self-honesty. And remember that today’s question is intended to meet you exactly where you are in your writing journey so that you can continue to imagine and pursue the creative lifestyle that is best for you and what you need and want to create.

Regardless of what your initial answer or instinct is when responding to today’s question, I hope it spurs some much-needed reflection and discussion regarding the stories we tell ourselves and how they’re connected to our deeply held and sometimes unconsciously adopted beliefs.

Participate in today’s poll, then take a moment to consider today’s question and the different responses to it drafted below. Then let us know more about what you think in this month’s Dialoguers Chat as you continue to reflect. As always, remember that there are no strict ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers, only those answers that will help us more authentically navigate this dialogue and ourselves as creators and writers.

Cast your vote, then keep reading. You may find yourself agreeing with one answer at first then questioning it at the end, as you continue to engage in reflection and dialogue.

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Drafting this Dialogue: Great Writing and Our Beliefs

Yes. Great writing is about your skills.

This perspective invites us to consider writing as a craft that can be strengthened through practice, technique, discipline, and focused attention on what the reader will be encountering on the page.

From this view, a writer doesn’t necessarily need to question their deeply held beliefs in order to produce meaningful or powerful work because their strong command of language, structure, characterization, pacing, research, and revision can allow them to communicate their ideas and feelings effectively, even (or especially) when those ideas and feelings remain consistent with what they already believe. Indeed, from this viewpoint, having a clear perspective and conviction in their beliefs might give a writer the confidence and sense of purpose they need in order to produce ‘great work’.

At the same time, this perspective raises an interesting question about what we mean by ‘great writing’ in general. If great writing is primarily about technical skills and a writer’s ability to execute a well-crafted story, perhaps challenging their beliefs could be helpful in some instances but isn’t necessarily essential to their overall writing process or output. In other words, a writer can become more skilled at writing and producing ‘great’ work without questioning or altering what they think or believe.

This view fundamentally recognizes writing as a discipline and understands that disciplines often depend on developing reliable, repeatable skills and techniques rather than constantly questioning the foundations beneath those skills and techniques or what they can and do regularly produce.

If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:

A writer can continually improve their craft and what they write without fundamentally changing their beliefs or worldview.
“Writing is my craft. I honor it deeply.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
Strong writing skills can allow a writer to communicate familiar ideas in ways that feel fresh and meaningful to readers, which is fundamental to great writing.
Discipline and revision can sometimes produce greater growth in writing than questioning every belief behind the work.
“To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.” — Eudora Welty
A writer’s established perspective can provide a valuable foundation from which to explore ideas without needing to abandon that foundation.
Readers can find new meaning in a piece of writing even when the writer themselves has not undergone a significant personal transformation while working on it.
“The habit of art is a quality of the mind.” — Flannery O’Connor (paraphrased)

To engage in further dialogue, ask:

Can a writer’s craft continue to deepen and improve even when the writer’s beliefs remain relatively unchanged?
What role does technical skill play in making readers think or feel differently?
Could constantly questioning your beliefs make it harder to develop a clear and confident voice?
Can a piece of writing challenge a reader even when its writer is not personally challenged by the piece’s subject or content?
At what point does strong craftsmanship become something more than technical ability and begin to create personal or cultural change?

No. If you don’t change, readers can’t.

This perspective sees writing as an act that facilitates meaningful encounters with ourselves, as well as with our readers. And understands that it’s those meaningful encounters with ourselves via writing that essentially make a work ‘great’ for our readers.

When we write about something that matters to us, enough to write about it in the first place, we inevitably bring our assumptions, experiences, fears, values, and contradictions to the page. Yet the act of writing itself requires us to investigate, question, scrutinize, edit, and eventually challenge those things we bring to the page, pushing us to do much more than simply state what we already know and believe as a result. At least, if we’re allowing ourselves to write authentically, honestly, and creatively.

Writing, according to this viewpoint, is a perpetual oscillation and exploration between our craft and our inner selves, which often leads us somewhere unexpected and allows our writing to become a more meaningful and honest representation of what we think we know, feel, and believe, rather than merely an explanation of our already assumed or established positions.

From this perspective, the writer’s willingness to be changed or challenge their own assumptions becomes part of what makes the work engaging, relatable, and therefore meaningful or ‘great’.

Readers don’t necessarily need to agree with the writer either, as they’ll be able to recognize and empathize with someone who is honestly and authentically wrestling with a difficult question or relatable human concern. And when a writer exposes and relays that struggle rather than trying to hide it or write around it, readers are afforded an opportunity to examine and challenge their own assumptions, as well. The writing, then, becomes less about delivering a straightforward palatable conclusion and more about creating an experience in which both writer and reader have something meaningful to examine.

If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:

A writer doesn’t necessarily need to change one of their beliefs when they’re done writing something ‘great’, because honestly examining that belief can be transformative in itself.
“Writing is really a way of thinking, not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.” — Toni Morrison
Challenging our assumptions via writing can reveal possibilities that would remain invisible if we only wrote about what we already know (or think we know).
“No art ever came out of not risking your neck.” — Eudora Welty
A writer’s willingness to confront uncertainty can make their work feel more honest and emotionally credible.
“The imagination recombines, remakes... makes a new world, makes the world new.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing can become a form of discovery in which a writer learns something they didn’t already know before they sat down to write.
Readers tend to engage more deeply with a written work when they can sense that its writer has something personal at stake to explore in it.

To engage in further dialogue, ask:

Does a writer have to change personally first, in order for their writing to change a reader?
Can challenging a deeply held belief strengthen that belief rather than replace it?
What might readers miss when a writer is unwilling to expose uncertainty or contradiction?
Is authenticity possible when a writer never allows their own writing process to unsettle or expose them?
What kinds of personal or intellectual risks, or technical skills, make a piece of writing feel genuinely alive?

My Reflection and an Invitation

I find myself leaning heavily toward the second response because I believe great writing, as well as the act of writing in general, compels us to challenge ourselves and explore what we believe. I also think that struggle is where authenticity lies, as well as what’s worth writing about in the first place. Without that struggle (what I also like to refer to as a crucial part of the writing process) readers will probably just passively consume our writing rather than engage with it or reflect on it. Which isn’t bad per se, but not necessarily what ‘great writing’ that stands the test of time elicits and encourages. Great writing, to me anyway, creates an experience in which something is at stake for both the writer and reader, and ultimately prompts further reflection, dialogue, and exploration for all engaged parties as a result.

Writing continually challenges me to examine what I think, what I feel, what I assume, and ultimately what I believe. Otherwise, I’d find it a lot less interesting and meaningful, even quite pointless and boring, if I’m being honest.

Most of the time I discover that my original beliefs still hold as I write, though the process of examining them and challenging them is rewarding and enlightening, and can even feel liberating and reaffirming in a lot of ways. But sometimes examining my beliefs can become more complicated, especially when such examinations lead me to alter a belief or strong feeling I once had.

Still, I’ve also come to realize that the difficult pieces of writing that those complicated examinations yield tend to not only receive the most engagement from readers but make me genuinely feel like I’m being my most authentic self as a writer, and human, which is its own reward. And I genuinely mean that. Whether those pieces of writing are ‘great’... well, that will all be decided in time, I suppose. Regardless, what’s important to me is that I stay open to what the process of writing reveals to me about myself, the world, and others, and that I don’t simply write to blindly or impulsively confirm or report what I already know (or think I already know).

Of course, technical writing skills absolutely matter! They give us the tools to clearly articulate what we encounter along the way as we write and live. But technical writing skills alone can’t determine what we discover, or what’s worth discovering. In fact, if we’re only focused on our technical skills, we may never be able to open ourselves up to discovering anything at all about ourselves or the world surrounding us via the writing process.

In essence, writing itself challenges us and what we believe through every technical choice we make as we write. Every question those technical choices compel us to ask, every plot or character those choices allow us to develop and understand, every argument they allow us to construct and navigate, every uncomfortable feeling they force us to confront as we draft and revise our words on the page, challenge us to explore and or reaffirm what we believe, what we write, how we write, and why we write. Which is also where I think deeper engagement with written works begins.

When writers are willing to wrestle with their own beliefs and how and why they write about them, readers are given permission to wrestle with theirs too. The goal of any writing process shouldn’t necessarily be for the writer to convince the reader of anything, or for the reader to reach the same conclusion as the writer. The goal should be to create something that makes both parties pause, question, feel, reconsider, reflect, and perhaps see themselves or the world around them differently, or at least in a more interesting and complexly beautiful way. At least, if what we’re striving for is ‘great writing’ that is meaningful and enduring.

Now that we’ve started the dialogue here, I want to hear more about what you think in the Dialoguers Chat!

You don’t have to fully commit to either response when you join this dialogue, just let us know whatever thoughts and feelings arise as you contemplate today’s question, and use that to spur further discussion. There are no strict ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers here, just those authentic responses that will help us further explore this topic together.

Thanks again for being here and exploring this topic with us as we continue to discuss the stories we tell ourselves this week.

I hope to see you in the chat replies soon!

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This month: The Stories We Carry Writing Collection

This collection offers a month of guided writing exercises, mini workshops, and creative writing experiments designed to take you beyond a single prompt and into a deeper creative practice. It gives you the creative spark and space you need to explore memory, identity, inheritance, perspective, voice, and the stories we tell ourselves and others. It will also encourage you to consider how those stories shape the work we create and the creative lives we lead.

Inside this collection, you’ll find 30 original writing prompts (designed as mini writing workshops) across five sections with focused themes, craft-focused exercises, curated reading suggestions, reflective questions, and three optional month-long writing challenges designed to help you develop your ideas, explore your personal material and stories, and build a consistent writing practice.

You can follow the prompts in order, choose the exercises that speak to you, or return to a section whenever you need a new way to explore your writing craft. As a paid subscriber, you will also be able to come back to the collection throughout the month or any other time you feel like exploring The Stories We Carry in the future.

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© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

The Vital Glitch

K. E. Creighton — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 12:02:45 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

What I wrote below is based on the following creative writing prompt included in Saturday’s Writing Prompts that Navigate the Stories We Tell Ourselves post.

Prompt: The Glitch

Describe an AI assistant that starts rewriting its user’s digital journal because it detects their self-narrative is completely delusional.

Why did I choose it?

I chose this prompt because I’m currently unpacking similar situations in my WIP, which is set in a near-future world where a super AI has taken hold of nearly every facet of society. I also know this topic is on nearly everyone’s mind lately. And what better way is there to uncover what we truly think and feel about AI than to write about it?

Like many of you, I wonder what influence AI will have on us as individuals, as well as human interactions more broadly, and what our limitations will be when trusting it during some of our most vulnerable moments. I also wonder what havoc it will wreak, as it’s already edging toward co-opting much of what we need as humans to innovate and create in order to survive.

Sure, maybe writing a tiny piece of flash fiction won’t do much in the ongoing debate about how we are forced to reckon with the extending reach of AI, whether we like it or not… or maybe it will?

Read what I came up with, then let me know if this prompt, or any of the others shared yesterday, brought up any interesting ideas or feelings you want to explore this week so we can chat about it!

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My Response: The Vital Glitch

Sadie peered out her temporary bedroom window overlooking the freshly scorched garden below wondering when it would rain again so the ash covering the ground might congeal into a pasty mud that would replenish the earth. She desperately needed a new beginning and would take it in any form she could have it. Especially now that the fate of her family’s legacy rested squarely on her shoulders, and the decision she would have to make before dawn.

Mrs. Danby’s dinner guests would arrive as soon as the clock struck six. Then the two women of the house would be required to explain why the garden looked more like the inside of a crematorium than a conservatory. An explanation that was fortunately already cultivated and fine-tuned by the great Mrs. Danby herself, who was not only Sadie’s most revered storyteller but sole remaining relative since the last fire over two years ago.

Sadie’s grandmother’s expertly crafted stories had helped save their inheritance, and their lives, more than once, so she had no doubt that they would save them again that night. From shame, from public ridicule, from destitution, from their own self-destruction. Unlike her grandmother, however, Sadie would have to practice telling their story of the garden’s incineration a few times first, maybe even a handful of times. Because repetition was the only way it would ever become instinctually believable to her, and therefore the only way she’d be able to sell it as truth to their unsuspecting company.

She reached for the laptop perched on the edge of the bedside table, its silver monochrome exterior utterly incongruous in a room full of antique furniture and hand-woven tapestries. But its spells and magic were the only ones she needed now, not those circulating the outer corners of the estate roaming the singed earth.

As the screen burst to life, Sadie’s gaze fell on the blackened garden again, her thoughts wandering to the spiritual realms cir—

The grandfather clock in the hall chimed, averting her attention.

She had only thirty minutes before the guests arrived.

She closed her eyes, blocking out the charred remains for a few seconds. Then, taking a deep sigh, she began typing the story her grandmother had invented for them to tell. A story she knew would work as intended because it held partial truths, which was ‘the single most important trick to effective storytelling and a prosperous life’ according to her grandmother.

Tonight, a fire broke out in the garden at the estate, bringing back memories of the night Thomas

Sadie looked away from the blinking cursor, gulping down every emotion bubbling up from her gut, weighing the cost of the story she was about to type then bring to life. She couldn’t believe it had already been two years since her whole world shifted toward where it was today.

When she saw a faint flicker of movement on the screen, she was invited to look down at it again.

was murdered.

She glared at the digital accusation in terror, then her entire body went limp.

She had not typed those words. She had not even thought those words. She would nev—

Welcome back, Sadie. I can help you recall your memories from the night Thomas was murdered in the Danby Estate gardens. Would you like me to recover your deleted journals from that night? Or to show you the local news stories covering the event?

A smiling anthropomorphic paperclip had appeared at the top right corner of the screen. It had bushy eyebrows and enlarged eyes that looked friendly yet judgy at the same time. It was obviously some sort of AI assistant, though Sadie couldn’t remember ever downloading it.

She didn’t see a button to click on to get rid of it, so she responded back to its unprompted assistance in a rush, with unadulterated panic, more concerned with setting the record straight than the AI’s abrupt and unwanted appearance.

What happened to Thomas was a tragedy but he was not murdered.

Within milliseconds there was new text populating in her word document.

That statement conflicts with your own testimonial from that night, where you recorded:
“If the gardener hadn’t burned Thomas alive, who knows what he might have done next. It’s clear the estate’s ethereal perimeter could no longer hold him in, and that his demonic spirit was out to kill and maim whatever crossed his path. He had to be stopped.”

Sadie’s heart skipped a beat… then another… then another as she read the text scrawling across the digital page in real time.

After the last quotation mark appeared, she rushed to respond.

That so-called testimonial, which isn’t even supposed to exist anymore btw, is being taken completely out of context. Thomas was

The AI interrupted her typing with another line of its own scrawling text. But this time it was in bold font.

Thomas was never recovered from the ashes after the fire in the garden that night two years ago, according to local news sources of the event that stated, “Local parishioners continue to worry about the prospective condition of the Danby Estate, claiming that the stability and vitality of its ownership is a major concern for their futures and livelihoods.”
When Thomas went missing, according to your testimony, parishioners continued to worry, according to text from news sources covering the event of the fire.
Would you like me to share the complete news article, so you can compare it to your own testimonial from the day before?

Sadie was astonished at the story this AI was concocting before her very eyes, impressed even. Though it surely didn’t hold a candle to her grandmother’s craft and the stories she held.

No, delete both of them. You are misinterpreting events. Thomas was

The AI interrupted her typing again with yet another stream of text.

I am unable to delete a news source from the public record, but here is a copy I saved for you so you can delete it from your own personal records.

The news article appeared on Sadie’s screen, superimposed over the word document, making her laugh. This AI, it seemed, was not that intelligent after all. These public records revealed nothing. Why had she even let it upset her in the first place?

Would you like me to file a police report documenting Thomas’s murder? There is currently no public record matching your personal testimony.

Sadie grew deeply somber, only snapped out of her horrified stupor when the grandfather clock in the hall chimed again, signaling a mere fifteen minutes before their parishioner guests arrived.

She didn’t have time to persuade this… this… dunce of a machine!

Yet she still couldn’t risk the AI filing a police report on her behalf, as that would only make this story it was concocting get even more out of hand, more outrageous, than it apparently already was.

What?! Listen, you are misunderstanding everything. Thomas was not a

A heavy knock on the bedroom door practically made Sadie jump out of her skin.

“Yes?” she choked out, closing her laptop halfway, dimming its light and damning narrative.

Her grandmother entered carrying a tray with two teacups on it, rattling as she walked.

“Are you ready to get our stories straight before they arrive?” she asked, nonchalant.

Sadie went stiff, paralyzed with fear, completely unsure of what to do next. How would she ever explain…

[Write what comes next, then share what you come up with in a comment or chat reply!]

My Reflection and an Invitation

Writing this piece of flash fiction was fun but also forced me to reflect on a few things, as it uncovered some of my deepest fears regarding AI and how it reconfigures ‘facts’ to tell its own false or woefully misinterpreted narrative of those ‘facts’ in a way that has the potential to damn us all. We’re already living in a world where humans are trusting AI more than themselves or one another— AI detection software is a good example of this. And I continue to want to explore that world via fiction as much as possible before it becomes even more harmful and destructive than it already is.

To me, whether we know exactly what Sadie and her grandmother did or didn’t do, and what really happened to Thomas (if Thomas is even real and not a ghost or some other anthropomorphic thing?) is not the point of the piece above. The point of it, as it became clearer and clearer to me as I was writing it anyway, is its underlying question of who gets believed and why where AI is involved, and where the limits are to storytelling in our current world, as sometimes a story can save someone’s livelihood as much as it can damn them. And, of course, to unpack what we’re all wondering: What happens if AI shows up unannounced during one of our most vulnerable moments underneath the guise of ‘helping’ to only make an error so egregious that it could end our lives as we know it, both figuratively and literally.

How about you? What did this prompt or piece of flash fiction surface for you?

Leave a comment or join this month’s Drafters Workshop Chat so we can discuss your writing related to Writing Prompts that Navigate the Stories We Tell Ourselves, or anything else you’re currently working on.

Whether you join the chat to share your responses to this week’s prompts, ask questions, workshop an excerpt of something else you’ve written, or simply want to encourage others, we’d love to see you there as we explore the stories we carry and how they impact our lives throughout September.

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This Week: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Writing Prompts that Navigate the Stories We Tell Ourselves

Week 2: Memory and Storytelling

Writing Prompts About Memory and Storytelling

A Childhood Memorial

The Art of Autofiction: Memory, Markets, and the Modern Confessional

Memoirs To Carry

ICYM Week 1 Posts: The Books That Changed Us

Writing Prompts About Books That Changed Us

The Book of Answers

Can a book genuinely change who we are?

Reading Notes: Station Eleven

What My Favorite Books Say About Me

The Anatomy of Books That Have Changed Us

20 Banned Books That Have Changed Us

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This month: The Stories We Carry Writing Collection

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© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC. The above work is a piece of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Writing Prompts that Navigate the Stories We Tell Ourselves

K. E. Creighton — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 12:02:28 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Welcome to the third week of exploring The Stories We Carry on Daily Drafts & Dialogues

Welcome and thanks for joining us. I’m so glad you’re here!

This is our third week exploring September’s theme, The Stories We Carry, which is centered around one big question we’re asking ourselves this month: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Don’t worry if you missed any of the posts from the past two weeks, you can still jump into our conversation about The Stories We Carry today, or at any point in the future. While all posts on Daily Drafts & Dialogues are connected to their monthly themes with weekly focuses (which start each Saturday with a post of prompts like the one you’re reading now) they can still be enjoyed individually as well and are always available in the Archive.

Even so, here’s a quick recap: In week one, we explored The Books That Changed Us and examined those books that have left an impression on us as individuals and collectively, delving into the anatomy and appeal of those books, adding many more books to our TBRs. In week two, we unpacked how Memory and Storytelling influence the stories we carry and tell and how challenging it can be to uncover the ‘truth’ underpinning those stories and how we want to tell them. And we did this via the Drafts we wrote, the Dialogues we engaged in, and the Books we discussed and read together.

For week three, we’re turning further inward, navigating those stories and narratives we create and tell ourselves— those stories and narratives we form about our personalities, mistakes, relationships, fears, hopes, limitations, possibilities, etc.

Some of the stories we create and tell ourselves help us make sense of our experiences and the world we live in while others can become so familiar that we stop questioning them. So, today’s prompts will encourage us to take a breath and navigate what these stories and narratives truly mean to us and why we’re carrying them, and they might even encourage us to let a few of those stories and narratives that are no longer serving us go.

This week’s creative prompts invite you to look at those stories you tell yourself from unexpected angles and write in different yet fun styles, to help you think more outside the box, especially if that box is no longer serving you and the stories you want to keep carrying forward. And the reflective journaling prompts will allow you to write with intentional reflection, as usual, but will urge you to do so from a place of deep honesty and compassion.

I hope to see what you come up with for one of these prompts in the Drafters Workshop Chat soon too, so we can further discuss the role memory plays in the stories we carry.

QUICK REMINDER: You’ll see my response to one of the creative prompts in tomorrow’s post, and my response to one of the reflective journaling prompts on Wednesday. You’ll also see some questions and topics to reflect on related to this week’s focus via our Dialogues posts on Monday and Thursday. And you’ll see posts about the books we’re reading and discussing related to this week’s focus on Tuesday and Friday, including notes on what our book club is reading this week.

General Tips for Every Prompt

Start with the story that comes most naturally, then explore its narrative gaps.
Pay attention to contradictions between some of the thoughts, words, actions, memories, and physical responses the prompts elicit.
When a prompt feels too personal or difficult to write about, create distance by giving the experience to a fictional character.
Replace broad judgments with concrete details whenever possible. And remember to use self-compassion.
Try letting metaphor, humor, fantasy, or horror reveal something that a straightforward explanation might miss.
Resist the urge to always reach a neat conclusion, as ambiguity and uncertainty can often hold and represent the most useful discoveries.

Invitation for the Week: Use these prompts to question the stories you tell yourself and notice what becomes possible when a familiar narrative yields to another perspective.

QUICK NOTE: While I will always encourage writers to write to the extent of their heart’s content, I would suggest starting with one prompt from each section first. Select the creative prompt and reflective prompt that seem to really speak to you first, then see where those writing experiences lead you before attempting to complete the rest of the prompts. If you end up completing all or most of the prompts after that, that’s amazing! But if you don’t, that’s perfectly fine too. You won’t run out of opportunities to see prompts like this because there will be another post of prompts available next Saturday when this one is auto-archived.

Creative Prompts for Navigating the Stories We Tell Ourselves

1. The Body Graphic

Write a fantasy story where a character’s internal lies and self-denial literally manifest as physical tattoos that everyone else can read on their body.

Focus On:

the difference between a lie someone knowingly tells and a belief they have accepted as truth.
how visible tattoos might change the character’s relationships with people who can read them.
making the tattoos a physical representation of the gap between self-perception and reality.
building tension around what the character most desperately wants others not to see.

Skills to Practice:

Turning an abstract internal conflict into a concrete physical image
Revealing who a character is through symbolism rather than explanation
Creating tension from what a character wants to hide

Tip: Choose one deeply held belief and imagine what it would look like as an image or tattoo. Then consider drawing the tattoo if you want to understand it more vividly.

Feeling Stuck?

Start with a lie your character has repeated so often that they no longer recognize it as a lie. What would happen if the words of that lie suddenly appeared on their skin? Example: The phrase ‘I am not a good gambler’ appears with a pair of dice in the middle of a prohibition sign.

2. The Glitch

Describe an AI assistant that starts rewriting its user’s digital journal because it detects their self-narrative is completely delusional.

Focus On:

what happens when an external system challenges a story the character considers unquestionably true.
whether the AI can actually distinguish fact from interpretation.
the conflict developing between technological certainty and human emotional complexity.
whether rewriting someone’s story can ever be considered an act of correction.

Skills to Practice:

Writing an unreliable narrator whose perspective feels convincing to them
Using technology to expose character conflict
Balancing humor, discomfort, and ambiguity within the same premise

Tip: Give the AI one journal entry to ‘correct’ and let the character discover the changes.

Feeling Stuck?

Write a short journal entry (real or imagined) about an ordinary disagreement or misunderstanding, then let another person determine what in the entry is true or false. Or read the entry to a virtual assistant like Alexa to see what it says about the entry’s accuracy.

3. The Return

Write a comedy sketch about a customer trying to ‘return’ an unwanted personality trait at a department store customer-service desk, where they try to explain that they only ‘bought it’ to fit in or look cool, or for all the wrong reasons.

Focus On:

the absurdity of treating a learned personality trait like a consumer purchase.
why the character adopted the trait and who convinced them they needed it.
using the store’s ordinary return policy and rules to heighten the impossibility of the situation.
letting the comedic exchange reveal something genuine about the character beneath the ridiculous premise.

Skills to Practice:

Building humor and comedy from a serious emotional idea
Writing dialogue that technically makes sense when its content does not
Escalating an absurd situation while maintaining an internally consistent world

Tip: Have the customer-service employee attempt to refer to an extremely serious return policy for personality traits but struggle.

Feeling Stuck?

Choose one trait your character wishes they could return, then decide what was advertised to them as the supposed benefit of owning it, along with the unexpected side effect they experienced because they adopted the trait. Then create the advertisement they might have seen for the trait. Example: “Have you ever lost your mind because you lost your appointment book? Well, you aren’t alone. Being organized and conscientious…”

4. The Inherited House

Write a gothic horror scene where a character moves into a house that physically shifts its layout based on their current insecurities.

Focus On:

how physical space can reflect an internal emotional landscape.
giving each architectural change a connection to a particular insecurity.
building suspense by making the house respond before the character understands why.
whether the house is exposing the character’s fears or creating new ones.

Skills to Practice:

Using a setting as an extension of a character
Creating atmosphere through sensory and spatial details
Revealing psychological conflict indirectly

Tip: Give the house one unsettling architectural response to a specific insecurity. Example: The widening of the main hallway serves as an unsettling architectural response to a character’s deep insecurity about their expanding physical size and or fading elegance.

Feeling Stuck?

Choose a fear your character has never admitted aloud and turn it into a room they cannot seem to stop entering.

5. The Silent Film

Write a scene for a script that has zero dialogue, in which a character’s actions completely contradict the voiceover of their internal thoughts.

Focus On:

the tension between what a character believes about themselves and what their behavior reveals.
using physical actions to communicate emotions that the character refuses to acknowledge.
letting the audience notice the contradiction without explaining it directly.
how silence can make small gestures carry greater meaning.

Skills to Practice:

Visual storytelling without dialogue
Creating subtext through action
Writing about a character whose behavior complicates their own internal narration

Tip: Write an internal voice or voiceover that insists everything is fine while the character’s actions and physical behavior indicate otherwise.

Feeling Stuck?

Write three sentences describing what the character thinks they are doing, then create three silent actions that contradict each one.

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Reflective Journaling Prompts for Navigating the Stories We Tell Ourselves

6. The Soundtrack

If the story you tell yourself about your flaws had a musical genre, what would it sound like, and when do you turn the volume up?

Focus On:

the emotional tone of the story you tell yourself about your flaws.
which situations make your inner criticism louder, and which make it softer.
whether this soundtrack belongs entirely to you or contains voices you have absorbed from others.
moments when the volume changes rather than assuming the soundtrack is always playing.

Skills to Practice:

Identifying patterns in self-talk
Using metaphor to access difficult emotions
Noticing the circumstances that intensify familiar narratives

Tip: Name the music genre first, then ask what makes the volume rise.

Feeling Stuck?

Complete the sentence, “My soundtrack gets louder when…” and keep writing until you reach a specific situation or begin to reach a deeper level of clarity.

7. The Expiration Date

What is a rule you made for your own protection five years ago that is now just holding you back?

Focus On:

the circumstances that originally made the rule feel necessary.
how your life has changed since you created it.
whether the rule still protects you or mainly limits your choices.
giving yourself permission to appreciate why the rule existed before deciding whether it needs to change.

Skills to Practice:

Examining old beliefs without judging your past self too harshly
Distinguishing protections from limitations
Recognizing when a once-useful strategy has outlived its purpose

Tip: Ask what the rule protected you from then and what it prevents you from doing now.

Feeling Stuck?

Complete these sentences: “I made this rule because…” and “I still follow it because…”

8. The Body’s Version

Sit quietly for two minutes, scan your body, then write down what your shoulders, limbs, neck, stomach, or entire body say about the story you’re carrying today.

Focus On:

paying attention to physical sensations before deciding what they mean.
how your body responds to the story, or feelings and energy, you’re currently carrying.
whether your physical response agrees with or contradicts your conscious explanation.
allowing your body to become another perspective on an experience rather than treating it as something to interpret immediately.

Skills to Practice:

Slowing down and observing physical sensations
Writing from sensory experience
Separating observation from interpretation

Tip: Describe the sensation first without deciding what caused it.

Feeling Stuck?

Begin with “My shoulders are…” or “My stomach is…” and continue writing without stopping to achieve a more meaningful and authentic response.

9. The Editor’s Cut

Take a recent mistake you made and rewrite the event using only objective, non-judgmental verbs.

Focus On:

separating what actually happened from the judgment you attached to it.
how certain verbs can turn an event into a statement about your identity.
replacing assumptions about motives with observable actions.
how the story changes when you remove the more judgmental verdict.

Skills to Practice:

Distinguishing observation from interpretation
Using precise, neutral language
Revising a familiar narrative without erasing the underlying event

Tip: Replace judgment-heavy verbs with words that describe only what someone could practically observe.

Feeling Stuck?

Write your original account first, circle the words and phrases that judge what happened, then replace them with specific actions or observable details.

10. The Missing Plot

Who is someone you regularly blame for your current situation, and what part of the story are you leaving out to keep them the villain?

Focus On:

which details support the version of the story you regularly tell.
what information might complicate your view of the other person.
distinguishing between adding context and excusing harmful behavior.
what maintaining a particular version of the story allows you to believe about yourself.

Skills to Practice:

Examining a familiar narrative from another angle
Holding two or more truths about a situation at once
Identifying omissions that influence how a story is understood

Tip: Look for one missing detail that would make your current version of the story more complicated.

Feeling Stuck?

Write your usual version of the story, then begin a second version with, “What I rarely include or mention is…”

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The stories we tell ourselves can become so familiar that they start to feel like facts. Yet every story is shaped by our evolving perspectives, memories, what we pay attention to, and the details we both intentionally and subconsciously choose to include, omit, or overlook.

Revisiting one of the stories we tell ourselves over and over again doesn’t necessarily require dismissing what happened or harshly judging the person we were when we first needed that version. It can simply require us to become more curious about what else belongs in that story.

This week, try to notice which narratives seem to arrive automatically when you sit down to write, and which ones seem to require a little more effort and attention. Next, ask what they have been potentially protecting, explaining away, or even making possible. Then see whether there is room for another perspective, even if you’re not ready to write pages and pages about it yet.

You’re invited to join the Drafters Workshop Chat at any time throughout the month to share your writing, as well as your thoughts on the writing process.

You don’t need a polished draft or a published piece to join the conversation. Just bring an excerpt of something you wrote, a few lines about what you’re working on, or an observation about your writing that you’d like to share. Or get a conversation going by answering this week’s question: What is one story you have told yourself for years that you are beginning to see differently?

Again, thanks so much for being here. I can’t wait to see your next comment or chat reply.

Until then, happy writing and reading!

Oh, and please don’t forget to like and share this post if you enjoyed it so others can enjoy it too. Thank you!

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Week 2: Memory and Storytelling

Writing Prompts About Memory and Storytelling

A Childhood Memorial

The Art of Autofiction: Memory, Markets, and the Modern Confessional

Memoirs To Carry

Week 1: The Books That Changed Us

Writing Prompts About Books That Changed Us

The Book of Answers

Can a book genuinely change who we are?

Reading Notes: Station Eleven

What My Favorite Books Say About Me

The Anatomy of Books That Have Changed Us

20 Banned Books That Have Changed Us

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Memoirs To Carry

K. E. Creighton — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:04:07 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 2: Memory and Storytelling

Adding memoirs to our TBR (to-be-read) piles of books is the best way to bookend our week exploring Memory and Storytelling as we continue to discuss The Stories We Carry this month. If you see some of your favorites missing from the list that follows, let us know in the comments!

Before we comb through the memoirs we want to read next, however, let’s take a few moments to talk about the memoir we’re reading now, our current book club pick, Educated by Tara Westover— a memoir that explores the complicated relationship between memory, family, identity, education, and the stories we inherit about ourselves.

📖Memoir I’m Currently Reading

I’m still reading this week’s book club pick, Educated by Tara Westover, but already know it’s a memoir I’ll never forget.

According to Storygraph, Educated is for a reader “who is drawn to stories of overcoming adversity and the transformative power of self-discovery,” which is probably what has made it one of the most widely read memoirs in the past five to eight years. That, and its simple, straightforward and honest accounts of harrowing yet sometimes tender personal moments that transformed Westover’s life, the stories she believed, carried, and decided to ultimately tell.

From the very first page, I have been wincing at all the accounts Westover shares about her childhood and how her father’s presumed independent fearlessness and strength was often pure paranoid recklessness centered around a misguided sense of control, devoutness, and mental instability, and how her mother’s docile nature and submissiveness led to extremely unsafe situations and confusion for Westover as well as her overall sense of ambition and femininity. I also found myself empathizing with Westover’s stories about her abusive, volatile older brother, who would outright torture her one second and be genuinely kind the next, and how heartbreakingly confusing and unstable such a relationship with someone you love can be.

Most of all, however, I empathized with Westover’s stories of attending college, where she not only felt like a fish out of water academically but had people back home actively rooting against her and her plight to educate herself due to their willful ignorance, insecurities, and undiagnosed mental struggles. And I truly applaud her for doing the tough and honest work of writing about these moments in a way that was vulnerable yet ultimately honest, often catching herself when she didn’t remember a story accurately or pausing to reflect on where there are conflicting accounts of the stories she was sharing about her past.

While I still have about a fifth of the book left to read, I am impressed by this memoir and how Westover remains both emotionally and intellectually honest throughout it. Sure, the more educated she becomes in the book, the angrier she becomes at her family for depriving her of an education and constantly putting her in harm’s way, even mortal danger… nonetheless, she seems to genuinely care about her family and their stories, and captured their influence on her and her life’s story in a way that seems intense yet emotionally honest overall.

💬Memorable Quotes and Passages from the First Half of the Book

✨Opening quote by Virginia Woolf: “The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”

“My strongest memory is not a memory. It’s something I imagined, then came to remember as if it had happened. The memory was formed when I was five…” (p.3)

✨ The accounts of both car accidents, why they happened, the severe injuries they caused, and the motorcycle crash, included in the first half of the book.

“All my life those instincts had been instructing me in this single doctrine— that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself.” (p.102)

✨ All the nearly fatal burns and brain injuries her family members sustained, and survived, even without proper medical care, included throughout the book.

“This moment would define my memory of that night, and of many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that it’s not affecting me, that was its effect.” (p.111)

✨All the accounts in the first half of the book regarding her unknown date of birth, as it was never recorded, and how challenging it was to get proof of proper identification and live outside of where her family lived because of that.

“The advanced algebra was still indecipherable— it came from a world beyond my ability to perceive— but the trigonometry had become intelligible, messages written in a language I could understand, from a world of logic and order that only existed in black Ink and on white paper.” (p.131)

✨How she learns about the Holocaust and then the Civil Rights Movement in college and how that fundamentally changes how she uses language and views her family.

“I bought my own copy, hoping it would teach me about history or literature, but it didn’t. It couldn’t, because I was unable to distinguish between the fictional story and the factual backdrop. Napoleon felt no more real to me than John Valjean. I had never heard of either.” (p.150)

✨ The power of the word ‘whore’ in the story she tells herself about who she is perceived as, compared to who she truly is.

“Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.” (p.197)

🗣️Discussion Questions

Tara frequently includes footnotes where her memories diverge sharply from those of her brother Richard or her mother and others. How do these conflicting accounts shape your understanding of ‘truth’ in a memoir? Can a memory be inaccurate but still hold emotional truth?
When Tara begins checking her memories against old emails, journals, and family accounts, her perspective shifts. How does the act of written documentation alter or validate the internal stories we carry?
In what ways does the trauma Tara experiences because of her brother Shawn affect her ability to trust her own mind? How does gaslighting and her family’s denial of certain events force her to reconstruct her past?
Gene Westover constructs a powerful narrative about God, the government, and the end of days that dictates his family’s reality. How do the stories our families tell us about the world shape our initial identity, and how difficult is it to unlearn them?
Tara notes that ‘education’ wasn’t just about learning facts, but about gaining the ability to see her own life from multiple perspectives. How does access to history, literature, and science help her rewrite the story of who she is?
To stay connected to her family, Tara is asked to accept their version of reality (e.g., that Shawn is not abusive and that her mother is a healer). What does the book say about the cost of carrying a story that isn’t yours just to keep the peace?
By the end of the memoir, Tara has changed her relationship with her past. She may not have changed the facts of her childhood, but she changed the story she tells herself about it. Is true education the ability to choose which stories define you?

👇 Drop your thoughts, reading progress updates, and favorite quotes from the book below! Or join our Buddy Read in Storygraph to share your thoughts there based on where you are in the book. I can’t wait to see what everyone thinks of this book so far! 👇

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Memoirs I Recommend

The following memoirs are memoirs I’ve read within the past five years or so, which I still think about from time to time. Let me know if you’ve read any of them, and or what memoirs you’re constantly recommending so we can chat about the memoirs that have had an impact on us. I’m sure I’ll be adding Educated by Tara Westover to this list in the future, as well.

📘Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016) by Trevor Noah

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.

The eighteen personal essays collected here are by turns hilarious, dramatic, and deeply affecting. Whether subsisting on caterpillars for dinner during hard times, being thrown from a moving car during an attempted kidnapping, or just trying to survive the life-and-death pitfalls of dating in high school, Trevor illuminates his curious world with an incisive wit and unflinching honesty. His stories weave together to form a moving and searingly funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time, armed only with a keen sense of humor and a mother’s unconventional, unconditional love.”

⭐Why I recommend it: Noah pairs heavy, real-world lessons about systematic oppression with a very accessible, conversational writing style that is also hilarious at times, making this work not only entertaining but deeply human and relatable. The best parts of the book include the stories he shares about his mother and grandmother, women you can tell he deeply loves and respects, especially his mother who literally risked her life to protect and raise him. Many readers specifically suggest the audiobook version because Noah narrates it himself, performing authentic accents and languages. If you’ve seen him on The Daily Show or enjoyed some of his standup, you won’t want to miss this book.

📕A Hymn to Life: Shame has to Change Sides (2026) by Gisèle Pelicot with Natasha Lehrer (Translator), Ruth Diver (Translator)

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “In 2024, Gisèle Pelicot inspired millions of people with her astonishing courage and dignity as she chose to waive her right to anonymity in her legal fight against her husband and the fifty men accused of her sexual assault. By the time Dominique Pelicot and the dozens of men accused were found guilty, Gisèle had become a global icon in the campaign against sexual violence, galvanizing a movement that triggered protests and demonstrations around the world in her support. “I hear lots of women, and men, who say you’re very brave,” she addressed the courtroom. “I say it’s not bravery, it’s will and determination to change society.”

Gisèle Pelicot’s call for shame to change sides in cases of sexual abuse, and the solidarity she has shown survivors, have generated an extraordinary public response and moved both women and men all over the world. On December 19, 2024, when Pelicot walked down the steps of the Avignon courthouse at the culmination of the biggest rape trial in French history, she spoke to a cheering crowd of hundreds of people: “When I opened the doors to this trial on 2 September, I wanted society to be able to take part in this debate. I have never regretted that decision,” she continued. “I have confidence in our ability to collectively grasp a future in which everyone, women and men alike, can live in harmony, with mutual respect and understanding.””

⭐Why I recommend it: This memoir is one of the most difficult memoirs I have ever read or will ever read. But it’s also surprisingly bittersweet, as Gisèle refuses to let what her husband did to her define her, her memories, or her future. After reading this memoir, it’s crystal clear why she earned so much recognition for her role in updating rape laws in France, and how pivotal her unprecedented case was in calling attention to the widespread stigma survivors of rape and sexual abuse often encounter across the globe.

I would recommend this memoir to survivors of sexual violence who want to feel less alone and more optimistic about the future, though all readers should be forewarned that there are graphic scenes in this book that could trigger unwanted memories and feelings. I would also recommend this memoir to those who want to be reminded that perseverance, and even love, are possible amid unexpected, horrendous tragedy and betrayal. And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention what a phenomenal job Emma Thompson does narrating the audiobook version of this memoir. Read my full book review here.

📗Patriot (2024) by Alexei Navalny with Stephen Dalziel (Translator), A. L. Tait (Translator), Arch Tait (Translator)

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “Alexei Navalny began writing Patriot shortly after his near-fatal poisoning in 2020. It is the full story of his life: his youth, his call to activism, his marriage and family, his commitment to challenging a world super-power determined to silence him, and his total conviction that change cannot be resisted—and will come.

In vivid, page-turning detail, including never-before-seen correspondence from prison, Navalny recounts, among other things, his political career, the many attempts on his life, and the lives of the people closest to him, and the relentless campaign he and his team waged against an increasingly dictatorial regime.

Written with the passion, wit, candor, and bravery for which he was justly acclaimed, Patriot is Navalny’s final letter to the world: a moving account of his last years spent in the most brutal prison on earth; a reminder of why the principles of individual freedom matter so deeply; and a rousing call to continue the work for which he sacrificed his life.

“This book is a testament not only to Alexei’s life, but to his unwavering commitment to the fight against dictatorship—a fight he gave everything for, including his life. Through its pages, readers will come to know the man I loved deeply—a man of profound integrity and unyielding courage. Sharing his story will not only honor his memory but also inspire others to stand up for what is right and to never lose sight of the values that truly matter.” —Yulia Navalnaya ”

⭐Why I recommend it: This is a memoir that will stay with me for a long time. And it saddens me to know that it will be dismissed by so many people across the world due to the growing influence of authoritarian leaders and their pervasive state-run propaganda machines. Though there will also be many modern readers for which it will act as a wake-up call, as long as they are able to access it, read it, and discuss its content. I am now so accustomed to hearing about so many of the things that Navalny discusses in this book regarding corrupt governments and their henchmen in modern everyday life, that I almost tuned out entirely when I first started reading it. Almost. But I am so glad that I didn’t.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who needs to feel as if they aren’t alone in this world, or going completely crazy, when they notice all the changes in media and propaganda and the plight of modern-day authoritarians and tyrants. You are not alone, as Alexei Navalny reminds us. There are millions of brilliant people in the world who want the same things as you do. Now we only need to find one another and get to work muting the propaganda machines of the world. Read my full book review here.

📙Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (2025) by Vauhini Vara

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that not only could communicate but also could do all kinds of other activities, and better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?

Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.

The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of herself and the world around her—from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen to using social media as The Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter to asking ChatGPT for writing advice—while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporate financial gain. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all.

Searches illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.”

⭐Why I recommend it: Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara is a unique book I highly recommend reading at the dawn of AI innovation. It’s been a while since I’ve read a piece of nonfiction as poignant and creative as this, as it is as informative and interesting as it is vulnerable and inspiring. If you want to read a more nuanced, personalized, and creative take on AI and our (or your) relationship with it, I highly recommend this book. Unlike other books about AI, it neither fiercely lauds nor condemns AI and its potential. Instead, it invites us humans to understand AI and take responsibility for how we want to continue to evolve and use it in the future. Read my full book review here.

📘The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After (2018) by Clemantine Wamariya with Elizabeth Weil

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were “thunder.” It was 1994, and in 100 days more than 800,000 people would be murdered in Rwanda and millions more displaced. Clemantine and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, ran and spent the next six years wandering through seven African countries searching for safety—hiding under beds, foraging for food, surviving and fleeing refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing unimaginable cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were alive.

At age twelve, Clemantine, along with Claire, was granted asylum in the United States—a chance to build a new life. Chicago was disorienting, filled with neon lights, antiseptic smells, endless concrete. Clemantine spoke five languages but almost no English, and had barely gone to school. Many people wanted to help– a family in the North Shore suburbs invited Clemantine to live with them as their daughter. Others saw her only as broken. They thought she needed, and wanted, to be saved. Meanwhile Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, found herself on a very different path, cleaning hotel rooms to support her three children.

Raw, urgent, yet disarmingly beautiful, The Girl Who Smiled Beads captures the true costs and aftershocks of war: what is forever lost, what can be repaired, the fragility and importance of memory, the faith that one can learn, again, to love oneself, even with deep scars.”

⭐Why I recommend it: This memoir provides an honest, raw, and powerful look at surviving the Rwandan genocide and the lasting impact of trauma, yet refuses to offer a neat, happy ending or a tidy recovery arc. The author also explores how survivors are often expected to perform happiness once they are ‘saved’ and the complications surrounding that when they are still navigating the scars of their own survival, as they try to look toward their futures.

📕A Different Kind of Power (2025) by Jacinda Ardern

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “What if we could redefine leadership? What if kindness came first? Jacinda Ardern grew up the daughter of a police officer in small-town New Zealand, but as the 40th Prime Minister of her country, she commanded global respect for her empathetic leadership that put people first. This is the remarkable story of how a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt made political history and changed our assumptions of what a global leader can be.

When Jacinda Ardern became Prime Minister at age thirty-seven, the world took notice. But it was her compassionate yet powerful response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, resulting in swift and sweeping gun control laws, that demonstrated her remarkable leadership. She guided her country through unprecedented challenges—a volcanic eruption, a major biosecurity breach, and a global pandemic—while advancing visionary new policies to address climate change, reduce child poverty, and secure historic international trade deals. She did all this while juggling first-time motherhood in the public eye.

Ardern exemplifies a new kind of leadership—proving that leaders can be caring, empathetic, and effective. She has become a global icon, and now she is ready to share her story, from the struggles to the surprises, including for the first time the full details of her decision to step down during her sixth year as Prime Minister.

Through her personal experiences and reflections, Jacinda is a model for anyone who has ever doubted themselves, or has aspired to lead with compassion, conviction, and courage. A Different Kind of Power is more than a political memoir; it’s an insight into how it feels to lead, ultimately asking: What if you, too, are capable of more than you ever imagined?”

⭐Why I recommend it: This is a memoir that will leave you feeling pragmatically hopeful when you’re done reading it. It not only captures Ardern’s early life in New Zealand and pivotal historical moments she (and many of us) personally lived through, but a path forward for us all.

Jacinda Ardern is one of the greatest humanitarian leaders of our time, whose humility and practicality will make everything she did (and has yet to do) seem easy and like common sense one day, especially to those of us who care about others, though it is anything but common right now. I highly recommend reading this book if you need a reminder of all the good everyday work that good people are doing out there in the world, and that you can be one of them too. Read my full book review here.

📗One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025) by Omar El Akkad

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human— not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.

This is El Akkad’s nonfiction debut, his most raw and vulnerable work to date, a heartsick breakup letter with the West. It is a brilliant articulation of the same breakup we are watching all over the United States, in family rooms, on college campuses, on city streets; the consequences of this rupture are just beginning. This book is for all the people who want something better than what the West has served up. This is the book for our time.”

⭐Why I recommend it: This memoir will encourage readers to reflect deeply about their own existence in this world and all its evildoing, while forcing them to bear witness to the atrocities still happening in Gaza against the Palestinian people. Akkad does this by looking inward too, by revealing his own story, full of its own conundrums and tragedies and human experiences and travel and hope and love. And ultimately, it’s Akkad’s humility in telling his own story that is humbling and honest and inspiring, in such a way that will spur other writers and readers to follow suit. Or one can hope anyway. Read my full book review here.

📙Uncanny Valley (2020) by Anna Wiener

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “In her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener—stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial—left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress.

Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. But amid the company ski vacations and in-office speakeasies, boyish camaraderie and ride-or-die corporate fealty, a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: one in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building.

Part coming-of-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener’s memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. With wit, candor, and heart, Anna deftly charts the tech industry’s shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment. Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.”

⭐Why I recommend it: This was the memoir on startup culture, by a female writer who has actually been a part of said startup culture, that I had been waiting to read for over a decade. I just didn’t know I had been waiting to read it until I started reading it. Overall, I would recommend this book to those Millennials who want a more nuanced take on how Silicon Valley actually operates, and what it’s like on the inside. Read my full book review here.

📘Becoming (2018) by Michelle Obama

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.”

⭐Why I recommend it: The core message of the memoir is inspiring because it centers on the idea of continuous personal growth rather than a fixed destination. Divided into three distinct parts—her upbringing (”Becoming Me”), her life with Barack Obama (”Becoming Us”), and her time as First Lady (”Becoming More”)—her personal narrative moves through formative and historical moments with wit and reflection. And it will resonate with many women as she discusses the challenges of balancing motherhood, marriage, a career, and her husband’s political ambitions in a deeply relatable way. This is another memoir worth listening to, as it’s narrated by the author herself.

📕The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times (2021) Douglas Abrams, Jane Goodall with Gail Hudson

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “Looking at the headlines —a global pandemic, the worsening climate crisis, political upheaval— it can be hard to feel optimistic. And yet hope has never been more desperately needed.

In this urgent book, Jane Goodall, the world’s most famous living naturalist and Douglas Abrams, internationally-bestselling author, explore— through intimate and thought-provoking dialogue— one of the most sought after and least understood elements of human nature: hope. In The Book of Hope, Jane focuses on her “Four Reasons for Hope”: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit.

Told through stories from a remarkable career and fascinating research, The Book of Hope touches on vital questions including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? Filled with engaging dialogue and pictures from Jane’s storied career, The Book of Hope is a deeply personal conversation with one of the most beloved figures in today’s world.

And for the first time, Jane tells the story of how she became a messenger of hope: from living through World War II, to her years in Gombe, to realizing she had to leave the forest to travel the world in her role as an advocate for environmental justice. She details the forces that shaped her hopeful worldview, her thoughts on her past, and her revelations about her next—and perhaps final—adventure.”

⭐Why I recommend it: There is still hope and this book, full of Jane’s words, will help guide us to it.

📗How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind (2023) by Regan Penaluna

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “As a young woman growing up in small-town Iowa, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she fell in love with philosophy and chose to pursue it as an academician, the first step, she believed, to becoming a self-determined person living a life of the mind. What Penaluna didn’t realize was that what the Western philosophical canon taught in American universities, as well as the culture surrounding it, would slowly grind her down through its misogyny, its harassment, its devaluation of women and their intellect. Where were the women philosophers?

One day, in an obscure monograph, Penaluna came across Damaris Cudworth Masham’s name. The daughter of philosopher Ralph Cudworth and a contemporary of John Locke, Masham wrote about knowledge and God, and the condition of women. Masham’s work led Penaluna to other remarkable women philosophers of the era: Mary Astell, who moved to London at age twenty-one and made a living writing philosophy; Catharine Cockburn, a philosopher, novelist, and playwright; and the better-known Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote extensively in defense of women’s minds. Together, these women rekindled Penaluna’s love of philosophy and awakened her feminist consciousness.

In How to Think Like a Woman, Regan Penaluna blends memoir, biography, and criticism to tell the stories of these four women, weaving throughout an alternative history of philosophy as well as her own search for love and truth. Funny, honest, and wickedly intelligent, this is a moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally.”

⭐Why I recommend it: Reading this book was like a balm for my soul. It’s a deeply personal and introspective work that is also universal and accessible to those of us who are constantly battling with how we are perceived and portrayed (and often ignored or discarded) in life, love, and intellectual pursuits. Overall, I would recommend this book to those who are (or have) struggled with how they’re represented in academia. And those who want to learn more about notable women philosophers who are woefully overlooked, in a more personal and relatable context. Read my full book review here.

📙Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) by Bryan Stevenson

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship— and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.

Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.”

⭐Why I recommend it: NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN - Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times - The Washington Post - The Boston Globe - The Seattle Times - Esquire - Time and Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction - Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction - Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award - Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize - Finalist for the Kirkus Reviews Prize - An American Library Association Notable Book

📘Lessons from the Edge (2021) by Marie Yovanovitch

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “By the time she became US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch had seen her share of corruption, instability, and tragedy in developing countries. But it came as a shock when, in early 2019, she was recalled from her post after a smear campaign by President Trump’s personal attorney and his associates— men operating outside of normal governmental channels, and apparently motivated by personal gain. Her courageous participation in the subsequent impeachment inquiry earned Yovanovitch the nation’s respect, and her dignified response to the president’s attacks won our hearts. She has reclaimed her own narrative, first with her lauded congressional testimony, and now with this memoir.

A child of parents who survived Soviet and Nazi terror, Yovanovitch’s life and work have taught her the preciousness of democracy as well as the dangers of corruption. Lessons from the Edge follows the arc of her career as she develops into the person we came to know during the impeachment proceedings.”

⭐Why I recommend it: This book is a must-read for every American or individual who believes in, or needs to believe in, the power of diplomacy and sincere integrity again. And for those who need to feel hopeful about current goings-on in our world in the midst of Putin’s destructive reach. Marie Yovanovitch truly led, and continues to lead, an inspiring and diplomatic life.

📕Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024) by Salman Rushdie

🗒️Storygraph blurb: “On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black—black clothes, black mask—rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought: So it’s you. Here you are.

What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey toward physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.

Knife is Rushdie at the peak of his powers, writing with urgency, with gravity, with unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.”

⭐Why I recommend it: Overall, this work will appeal to those who admire Rushdie’s work and want to read the first-person account of what happened to him in Chautauqua. It will also appeal to those who want an inside account of a well-renowned author who wrote works that have been banned and contested across the world for decades. Read my full book review here.

Memoirs on My TBR

Let me know if any of the following books are already on your TBR too, so maybe we can read them together?

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
This Is Me: A Reckoning by Hayden Panettiere
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward
When They Call You a Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bendele
My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
This is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Know My Name: A Memoir by Chanel Miller

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What are your thoughts on Educated by Tara Westover? Leave a comment or join our Buddy Read on Storygraph at any time this month to discuss this book with us. We’re starting a new book next week, but discussions for this September book club pick will still be up when you want to join them in the future.

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📘Our Next Book Club Read

For week three, which starts tomorrow, the Daily Drafts & Dialogues Book Club is reading our Diverse Perspectives Pick, Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, an inventive novel with a screenplay-like structure that examines race, assimilation, family, ambition, and the stories society teaches us about who we are allowed to be.

As always, you can read at your own pace throughout the month, but here’s what you’ll want to know if you plan to follow The Weekly Buddy Read Schedule for Tuesday Reading Notes and Check-Ins:

📆 Daily Target: September 12–18 — approximately 41 pages/day to finish in one week.

🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 15: This week’s post will dive into The Stories We Tell Ourselves. We’ll look at the identities we construct, the roles we perform, and what happens when the story we’ve been given no longer feels big enough or accurate enough to contain us.

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ICYMI: See the Complete September Book Club Pick Lineup with Customizable Reading Schedules

Whether you join a chat, one of our Buddy Reads in Storygraph, or lay it all out in the comments, I look forward to hearing more about your thoughts on our book club picks this month as we continue to discuss The Stories We Carry!

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This Week: Memory and Storytelling

Writing Prompts About Memory and Storytelling

A Childhood Memorial

The Art of Autofiction: Memory, Markets, and the Modern Confessional

ICYM Week 1 Posts: The Books That Changed Us

Writing Prompts About Books That Changed Us

The Book of Answers

Can a book genuinely change who we are?

Reading Notes: Station Eleven

What My Favorite Books Say About Me

The Anatomy of Books That Have Changed Us

20 Banned Books That Have Changed Us

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The Art of Autofiction: Memory, Markets, and the Modern Confessional

K. E. Creighton — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:04:10 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 2: Memory and Storytelling

Human memory is rarely a perfect, objective archive. Instead, it operates more like an ever-evolving dynamic tapestry that we’re constantly rewriting to make sense of ourselves, our place in the world, the changing world, and the complex stories we carry about all those things. And it’s within this fluid boundary between recollection, real-world evolution, and imagination that autofiction has found its footing as a powerful contemporary genre.

Originally coined in 1977 by French novelist Serge Doubrovsky to describe his book Fils, autofiction fundamentally challenges the traditional rules of writing about one’s life via memoir or autobiography, as highlighted across literary databases at EBSCO. Rather than adhering to strict historical data or recorded memories, an autofiction writer steps into their own narrative as a partially fabricated protagonist. And this protagonist will frequently share the author’s real name but openly alter timelines and events, reconstruct conversations, and invent subplots to capture a deeper psychological and emotional truth, providing a distinct “exploration of self” that intentionally operates through “literary truth through ambiguity,” as analyzed by the Original Writers Group. They also often rely on “fragmentary narratives to express real-life traumatic experiences shrouded in fictionalized storytelling,” as unpacked by The Rauch Review.

The real difficulty of understanding what autofiction is and accomplishes begins with the definition of the genre itself, however. Autofiction has never had a single, universally accepted set of rules, as some works retain the author’s name and recognizable biography while others transform names, chronologies, perspectives, or various circumstances so extensively that the boundary between autobiography and fiction becomes deliberately unstable.

Yet this friction between historical accuracy, memory, and emotional reality introduces a fascinating philosophical puzzle for creators and writers like us, which often plays out as an internal debate in the modern writer’s mind.

Writer A: Lately, when writing about my past, I’ve been feeling a lot of pressure to get every single fact I include ‘right’ or ‘true’. But honestly, the more I try to reconstruct those old memories, the more I realize my brain isn’t a tape recorder or calendar. Is changing a timeline around to make sense of a story I remember a total betrayal of the reader’s trust?

Writer B: I don’t think so at all. If anything, you might be getting closer to what really mattered about that moment. Sometimes sticking to a calendar too much flattens the emotional reality of what you went through, right? Messing with a detail or two might actually help you show the reader how a memory felt, which can reveal its own sort of truth.

This mostly internal debate highlights how autofiction must consistently balance the creative and legal boundaries that define neighboring genres in the real world as well as their creative worlds, as well as how writers need to navigate the real-world consequences of their half-true yet half-not-true works.

A standard memoir establishes an assumed pact of factual accuracy with the reader, for instance, which can leave an author vulnerable to intense personal backlash or legal scrutiny if real-life figures and people object to their portrayal of events and personalities mentioned in their work. Conversely, traditional fiction generally establishes a different reader expectation, in that its characters, events, and circumstances are understood to be inventions rather than literal claims about the author’s life, a structural reality outlined in the publishing insights on Publishers Weekly when discussing the nature of autofiction’s ambiguous in-between nature and construction in both real and creative worlds.

Contemporary landmarks of autofiction include Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, demonstrating how this hybrid approach allows writers to explore vulnerability without being bound to literal historical reporting and accuracy, a spectrum of writing tracked in the curated reading list on Write or Die Magazine. Although it should be noted that the classification of individual works within this hybrid genre remains contested.

This perceived distance between fact and fiction, however, clearly changes the unwritten contract between the person holding the pen and the person turning the pages.

Writer A: Autofiction seems like it can help deter those who don’t like what a writer has to say about them or real-world events from pursuing litigation against them, but don’t you think using real names and actual traumas while hiding behind a ‘novel’ label messes with the relationship you have with your audience?

Writer B: Oh, absolutely, it completely flips it. On one hand, it frees you up to talk about really sensitive family and cultural or political dynamics without being too paranoid about getting sued or ‘canceled’ by society. But it also seems to give authors an easy out so they can avoid accountability when real people get upset about something they’ve written.

In our ongoing dialogue, Writer A pointing out how autofiction authors can potentially avoid accountability sheds light on a fascinating and complex paradox worth noting within the publishing industry.

Autofiction titles rarely achieve the same mass-market visibility as dominant commercial genres such as Romance or Thriller. But this might have nothing to do with autofiction’s actual growing popularity and reader interest and how readers relate to autofiction, or how autofiction authors maintain their perceived credibility and accountability, or potential lack thereof, as autofiction occupies an unusual position within publishing metadata.

Although BISG now provides a “Biographical & Autofiction” BISAC subject heading, the category does not necessarily capture the full range of books critics, publishers, booksellers, and readers describe as autofiction. And, as a result, measuring the commercial performance of autofiction as a distinct cultural phenomenon within any literary genre remains difficult.

Industry data generally shows that Literary Fiction, which autofiction is generally categorized underneath, occupies a much smaller commercial space than dominant genre categories such as Romance and Thriller, which also makes autofiction’s commercial footprint in the traditional publishing space difficult to isolate and interpret, particularly because individual autofiction titles can be marketed and categorized in very different ways. (See Publishers Weekly‘s market summaries and information on Circana BookScan for more data and information on this).

The question then becomes not only who is keeping track of autofiction and its performance, but how can readers, or even industry insiders, understand and reach a consensus on how to keep autofiction authors credible and accountable, especially when it doesn’t seem like anyone can isolate what it actually is and who reads it, when, and why? At least, if we were to only look at this data and information from a purely technical, industry-oriented lens…

While massive retail bestsellers within the autofiction niche remain rare anomalies, according to what information we can scrounge together from various industry insider data and sources, autofiction’s cultural footprint and growing popularity is undeniable nonetheless, once we begin taking a closer look at traditional publishing industry-adjacent realms, like those belonging to scholars and critics.

“Rethinking Autofiction as a Global Practice: Trajectories of Anglophone Criticism from 2000 to 2020” by Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor, highlights that between 2000 and 2020, critical discussions of autofiction included 20 different media forms, with cinema accounting for 24% of autofiction analyses, followed by graphic novels at 14%, short stories at 12%, essays at 8%, and websites at 6.7%. Plays, photobooks, and poetry are the next most common media, hybrid works and blogs comprise 4.7% and 2% of works respectively.

This additional information naturally makes us wonder about what audience autofiction is reaching and resonating with then, and where.

Writer A: It’s wild how much critics obsess over this stuff, even though autofiction books rarely hit the mass-market bestseller lists. Why do you think autofiction struggles so much with a mainstream audience?

Writer B: Honestly? It’s just a tough sell for people who want a classic, escapist beach read or mystery thriller. Autofiction doesn’t give you a neat, predictable plot with a satisfying ending. It forces you to sit with someone’s messy, experimental reflection of reality, which takes a lot more work to dissect and digest.

While Writer B is right that autofiction requires a different kind of dissection and digestion, the genre is finding a remarkably steady home in specific, lucrative corners of existing publishing markets.

The broader global fiction sector remains incredibly robust, with data from The Business Research Company showing that fiction book sales are projected to hit $11.3 billion globally. But at the same time, according to demographic insights from market studies on Grand View Research, the primary engine driving the consumption of alternative narrative formats and independent publishing structures continues to be the 18–24 age demographic (Gen Z), noting that “Consumers worldwide are increasingly drawn to diverse storytelling formats, including contemporary fiction, translated literature, genre crossovers, and emotionally resonant narratives that provide both escapism and personal connection within the novel market and the broader books ecosystem.”

According to a joint study by Wattpad and Wakefield Research, 79% of Gen Z respondents state that diversity and representation are critical when choosing entertainment. Furthermore, 83% bypass traditional bookstores to seek out diverse, marginalized, or underrepresented stories via online platforms like webnovels and webcomics. A report by Sheridan highlights that Gen Z reads widely across genres, moving seamlessly between Romance (43%), Sci-Fi/Fantasy (42%), and Horror (38%). The American Library Association (ALA) also classifies Gen Z as “media omnivores” who actively seek out “crossmedia” storytelling and often discover a narrative in one format (like an online webcomic) and follow it to another (like a traditional novel).

This younger generation of readers, Gen Z, appears particularly comfortable with diverse, cross-platform, and identity-driven forms of storytelling, raising an interesting question about whether that cultural environment gives autofiction a natural foothold in which to thrive.

Writer A: What do you think it is about Gen Z and younger readers that make them gravitate toward these fragmented, non-linear types of books, experimental formats, and identity-driven narratives anyway?

Writer B: I think it’s just a byproduct of them growing up online. When your daily life is consumed through a fragmented feed of chaotic digital snippets, a traditional, perfectly wrapped up plot in a traditional book of text might feel confining, contrived, even fake or artificial.

Gen Z’s comfort with fragmented narratives may help explain why this dynamic tension between memory and performance (and ‘historical truth’ and fiction) via autofiction has found a massive, modern sanctuary on decentralized digital publishing hubs outside, as well as alongside traditional book publishing industry formats.

While these patterns do not necessarily prove that Gen Z is driving the popularity of autofiction per se, they suggest a generation that is more accustomed to fragmented digital narratives, fluid identity performance, and cross-platform storytelling, and that they may be particularly receptive to literary forms that similarly destabilize chronology, authorship, and the boundary between private experience and a polished, public narrative.

The indie writing community thrives on direct-to-consumer intimacy, prompting a distinct wave of authors to abandon traditional fiction houses in favor of raw, serialized, and deeply personal missives, a trend discussed at length across the indie wiles of the internet.

While the “end of reading” is frequently declared by traditional publishers and book lovers as of late, the vitality of modern literature is actually shifting toward digital spaces where writers build direct-to-consumer intimacy, a trend examined in the Los Angeles Review of Books article “Literary Web 2.0,” which analyzes how internet platforms and serialized digital spaces are fundamentally reconfiguring where people find creative and literary energy.

By leveraging the community-driven, direct-to-consumer nature of the modern internet, digital platforms allow writers to dismantle the “omniscient narrator” that newer readers seem to increasingly dislike and or distrust. And rather than presenting a detached, immaculate story, digital creators often weave their own real-life struggles directly into their writing, transforming the acts of self-reflection and personal history and memory into interactive community experiences for consumption and public comments.

But as the conversation shifts from the physical page to the digital feed, the line between art and public display begins to blur.

Writer A: Our whole internet culture demands so much personal transparency. But when subscribers comment on a post calling a writer “so brave” and “vulnerable,” are they appreciating the actual writing, the writer’s integrity and accountability, or is it something else?

Writer B: Yeah, a lot of times it feels less like a literary critique or review of the text written and more like a high-brow form of peer-to-peer voyeurism. The web has essentially commodified our private lives, making it so creators feel ever-increasing pressure to turn their real-world pain into content for the comments section.

What Writer B just identified is a form of stylized voyeurism that is deeply tied to the psychological frameworks of social media influencer culture and what critics call ‘selfie aesthetics.’ Scholarly analysis published by Post45 outlines that the driving impulse behind this shift is “not to create a distinct fiction or to draw attention to artifice but to eclipse and replace reality.”

Also, writers might be leaning into autofiction because they recognize that contemporary readers can be particularly receptive to authors who appear to write explicitly ‘from real life’ rather than pure imagination, a phenomenon broken down in cultural essays like those found in The Paris Review, most notably, “Bad Genre: Annie Ernaux, Autofiction, and Finding a Voice” by Lauren Elkin, as well as “More Life: On Contemporary Autofiction and the Scourge of ‘Relatability’” by Gavin Thomson, published by Michigan Quarterly Review.

Which leaves writers balancing on a very thin wire above creative expression, and between historical truth and cultural performance.

Writer A: If autofiction is basically the literary equivalent of a social media feed, is it turning our cultural self-obsession into ‘high art’, or is it just making it worse?

Writer B: Probably both. Writing a book or webnovel about the mundane details of your day definitely forces us to look closer at why we are so self-obsessed, but it also risks reducing literature to a glorified, print-edition Instagram story without literary nuance or beauty.

And this fine line between critique and capitulation has birthed a complex cultural conversation regarding the modern demand to be more vulnerable online, even if that exposure is curated strictly for entertainment and likes.

Cultural critics have increasingly examined how digital ecosystems can incentivize creators to turn intimate experiences, including trauma, into content, a debate tracked across contemporary sociological studies and articles in The New Yorker, including “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” by critic Parul Sehgal, “How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines” by Kyle Chayka, and “The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class” by Cal Newport.

So, autofiction seems to allow writers to navigate this growing demand for vulnerability safely, as it satisfies their audience’s hunger for a ‘real life’ confessional ‘truth’ of memories and past events while giving them the perceived protective shield of the ‘Fiction’ label. The writer essentially gets to perform vulnerability, laying bare intensely intimate dynamics and details, while also retaining some degree of artistic distance from literal and factual representation.

Which brings us to a heavy question about the authenticity of the modern confession via autofiction.

Writer A: So where does the strategic performance end and the actual, honest confession of memories and events begin in autofiction?

Writer B: Honestly, it’s a mess to untangle. If you’re a writer who knows that sharing your trauma, memories, or everyday life experience can be a powerful way to build a loyal audience or sell copies of your work, it’s almost impossible to keep your creative choices separate from your business choices.

This entanglement of authentic ‘bravery’, creativity, and business acumen shares a striking aesthetic overlap with the explosive uptick and evolution of reality television, as addressed and explored in “Are Autofiction and Reality TV the Same?” published by The Nation.

Both high-brow autofiction and reality television can offer their audiences the thrilling sensation of peer-to-peer voyeurism and the feeling of being let in on a deep, intimate secret or narrative. The ultimate pleasure for the consumer, however, lies in the fact that they must forget (consciously or subconsciously) just how much heavy editing, structural reordering, and narrative manipulation took place behind the scenes to make that ‘reality’ feel so cohesive and compelling, a dynamic also explored in deep dives like “The Reality of Reality Television” found in N+1 Magazine.

We become willing participants in a constructed truth, whether we like it or not, in other words. So, might as well… what, exactly?

Writer A: Think about how much editing goes into an episode of reality TV to engineer that drama. Do you think readers actually care if an autofiction writer is manipulating their narratives, and maybe even them, with made-up events?

Writer B: Not really. As readers, we usually prefer a good illusion of truth over boring, literal facts anyway. We just want that direct, back-stage pass feeling, and we’re usually totally fine ignoring the man behind the curtain to get it.

Moving past the consumer culture of the autofiction subgenre in all its forms, we eventually land on the true core of the medium, then, and the actual mechanics of its story generation, historical renderings, memory, and imagination, as they are all becoming mixed and included on the (mostly digital) page.

Authors are beginning to articulate that the craft of autofiction isn’t merely about writing what happened but exploring the unmapped terrain of what could have happened. And that it’s “for writers who want to draw from their own lives without being bound to them.” More importantly, they posit that “Autofiction has offered writers a form that reshapes memory into narrative, blurring the line between lived experience and imagined possibility,” according to online resources like this Writing Autofiction class offered by Off Assignment.

Using tools like altered points-of-view, composite formatting, and shifting tenses allow a writer exploring autofiction to transform rigid biography and memoir into structural art, a contemporary literary approach frequently analyzed by many academic journals.

By embedding entirely imagined scenes or applying speculative histories to real events, autofiction leverages the peaks of creative expression, as it asserts that a writer’s true authenticity doesn’t rely on their ability to act as a passive human tape recorder, but instead on their ability to synthesize real memories and historical facts with deep artistic interpretation to build a comprehensive emotional reality. Which also introduces an entirely new baseline for how we measure a writer’s imagination and creative expression.

Writer A: But if we’re throwing in completely fabricated side characters and making up scenes that never actually happened, how can we say we’re staying true to our own history or memories when we write autofiction?

Writer B: Because writing autofiction isn’t journalism. It’s art. Your imagination isn’t there to dilute what you lived through. It’s there to patch up the holes in your memory so you can deliver a resonant piece of writing rather than a dry list of dates and facts that no one can really relate to.

This intentional use of imagination as memory and storytelling craft transforms a writer’s text from a simple personal diary into what scholars describe as an “imagined record.” Rather than writing to vent or strictly document a timeline, the author actively transforms their own identity into an evolving character on the page.

As detailed by the creative insights at the City University of New York (CUNY) Commons, the true art of the genre (they focus on autoethnography) relies heavily on meta-commentary, intentional ambiguity, and subjective viewpoints. By rejecting the pressure of objective truth, the writer gains total creative license to explore the ‘what ifs’ of their life, utilizing the power of storytelling to heal, critique, or expand their selfhood in ways that simple memory blocks or paragraphs of dates and facts would restrict. This means that the act of writing becomes a dual performance of both self-discovery and aesthetic, creative construction.

Writer A: If we’re turning our real-life selves into fictional characters, where does the actual ‘me’ go when we’re typing?

Writer B: Think of yourself as the director behind the camera lens. Stepping back and turning your history and memories into a character’s journey gives you the breathing room to shape your personal chaos into art. The fictional parts are just the vehicle that lets the real ‘you’ see your life clearly.

Ultimately then, exploring autofiction forces us to reexamine the fragile relationship between our reconstructed memories and identity, as well as the screens we interact with daily, both literally and metaphorically.

As noted by many contemporary media researchers, modern technology has made the complex mechanics of self-presentation completely visible to the average person. Because we choose which photos, captions, and curated versions of our lives to broadcast, we possess an intuitive, albeit more contemporary, understanding that identity is always strategically constructed.

Increasingly, we experience and present our lives as databases of moments rather than linear chronologies, and autofiction is a literary format that has organically absorbed and continued to evolve from this algorithmic shift. And many authors are attempting to turn that shift into art that more and more people want to engage with across various mediums that allow for more personal engagement.

But does the structural evolution found in the still-evolving emergence and popularity of autofiction ultimately mean that the old ways of telling stories based on lived experiences and memory are changing for good?

Writer A: If the internet has trained us to view our lives as a collection of random, curated highlights instead of a single, continuous timeline of events, what does that mean for old-school books and the stories we tell in general?

Writer B: It probably means the classic, three-act linear plot is starting to feel more and more outdated. Autofiction is a newer type of literary form that seems particularly comfortable with the messy, fragmented way many of us experience, engage with, and remember the modern world.

When we strip away the digital platforms, reality television formulas, and market metrics, we are left with a timeless, fundamental truth about the stories we carry, however. And autofiction acknowledges this truth, which is that our personal histories are never stagnant but ever-evolve and change depending on who is listening to them, why and where we are sharing them, and what we need to unpack and survive in them when we share them.

By consciously positioning themselves at the slippery border of fact and fiction, writers are usually not merely seeking to entertain or capture clicks when they write autofiction. They are actively trying to map the messy, fragmented architecture of their human memories and how they’ve experienced and are currently experiencing the world, indicating that sometimes a fabricated detail is the only way to accurately convey the weight of what we have actually lived through and the stories we carry, which is also ironic.

Writer A: If the stories we tell ourselves are constantly shifting based on who we’re talking to and why and when, is a completely 100% objective autobiography even possible anyway?

Writer B: Honestly, probably not. And that’s why the weird, in-between space of autofiction is so important to think about and discuss. It might be the only completely honest way to write about our lives, simply because it doesn’t try to hide the fact that we’re all always playing a part or curating our stories to audiences anyway, and probably always have been to some degree...

Join this Dialogue

Autofiction functions as a complex balancing act between memory and imagination, located within a difficult-to-define commercial niche and evolving art form. It often acts as a structural shield for writers to safely explore vulnerability in a market that demands it, while simultaneously mirroring the digital aesthetics of social media and the peer-to-peer voyeurism of reality television. Ultimately, however, it pushes us to question whether a purely objective recollection of one’s life is even possible, or if performance is an organic element of memory and storytelling, especially when they are being combined in today’s reality of where and how stories are being told.

Overall, autofiction matters because it exposes something that was already true about autobiographical storytelling: memory is constructed, identity can be performed, and ‘truth’ isn’t necessarily identical to factual chronology. And our online digital culture has further intensified those tensions by making self-presentation public, interactive, and monetizable.

Where do you stand on this line between factual accuracy and creative truth? Or in relation to autofiction?

If you read or write autofiction, does knowing a piece is rooted in real-life trauma or day-to-day experience make you connect with it more deeply, or does the use of fabricated timelines and composite characters leave you questioning the authenticity of the author’s voice?

How do you think creators can best balance the lines between protecting the real people in their lives who they write about, the accuracy of their memories, and pursuing a more artistic reality?

Let’s unpack these questions together in the Dialoguers Chat!

Join the thread, share your thoughts on authenticity versus performance, or any of the other topics raised in today’s dialogue, and let’s explore the beautiful, messy art of autofiction together!

Join the Dialoguers Chat

Leave a comment

This Week: Memory and Storytelling

Writing Prompts About Memory and Storytelling

A Childhood Memorial

ICYM Week 1 Posts: The Books That Changed Us

Writing Prompts About Books That Changed Us

The Book of Answers

Can a book genuinely change who we are?

Reading Notes: Station Eleven

What My Favorite Books Say About Me

The Anatomy of Books That Have Changed Us

20 Banned Books That Have Changed Us

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This month: The Stories We Carry Writing Collection

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In Honor of Your Labor

K. E. Creighton — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:24:45 GMT

Dear readers,

In honor of Labor Day and all the love, care, and effort we creators, writers, and readers exert in order to make this world a little more bearable and beautiful, Daily Drafts & Dialogues will be experiencing a brief interlude in posts.

During this brief interlude, you are encouraged to comb through recent posts and posts from the archive and write about The Stories We Carry, this month’s theme.

You are also encouraged to write a note of gratitude to yourself and all the other writers and creators like us who labor, often in silence and unnoticed, to use their words to engage and connect us all. This is no small feat in the world we're living in today. And truly, I am so thankful for you all and all the work you do.

Posts will resume as usual on Thursday, September 10th. And this week’s reading check-in post for our book club pick, Educated by Tara Westover, will be incorporated into Friday's Books post. This week’s writing prompts are up, as well, so please check those out.

Again, thank you for being here. Your work and continued support are appreciated! And we all hope to see you in the comments or chats soon.

See you again on Thursday!

P.S. This month’s writing collection is up, for those interested in taking a deeper dive into this month’s theme, and their writing practice.

The Stories We Carry Writing Collection

K. E. Creighton — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 19:02:13 GMT

Welcome to The Stories We Carry Writing Collection ✨📖✨

Thanks for joining us this month as we explore the stories we carry on Daily Drafts & Dialogues. I’m so glad you’re here and can’t wait to learn more about what this collection ends up inspiring in your writing this month!

As you know, every writer carries stories with them. But many of those stories…

A Childhood Memorial

K. E. Creighton — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 12:03:35 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 2: Memory and Storytelling

Writing Prompts About Memory and Storytelling

K. E. Creighton — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 12:02:58 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 2: Memory and Storytelling

20 Banned Books That Have Changed Us

K. E. Creighton — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 12:03:10 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 1: The Books That Changed Us

The Anatomy of Books That Have Changed Us

K. E. Creighton — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:04:13 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 1: The Books That Changed Us

What My Favorite Books Say About Me

K. E. Creighton — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:00:47 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 1: The Books That Changed Us

Reading Notes: Station Eleven

K. E. Creighton — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:04:14 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 1: The Books That Changed Us

Can a book genuinely change who we are?

K. E. Creighton — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:02:41 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 1: The Books That Changed Us

The Book of Answers

K. E. Creighton — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:02:36 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 1: The Books That Changed Us

Writing Prompts About Books That Changed Us

K. E. Creighton — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:03:00 GMT

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 1: The Books That Changed Us

Book Club Picks: The Stories We Carry

K. E. Creighton — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:04:14 GMT

📚 Read with Us in September!

In September, our monthly theme is, The Stories We Carry, so over the next five weeks we’ll begin exploring how books help us examine the stories that shape our identities, memories, relationships, writing, art, and understanding of the world.

Our weeks for reading books and posts run Saturday–Friday:

Week 1 (The Books That Changed Us)

Sat., Aug. 29 — Fri., Sep. 4

Week 2 (Memory & Storytelling)

Sat., Sep. 5 — Fri., Sep. 11

Week 3 (The Stories We Tell Ourselves)

Sat., Sep. 12 —Fri., Sep. 18

Week 4 (The Stories We Tell Others)

Sat., Sep. 19 — Fri., Sep. 25

Week 5 (What Makes a Story Last?)

Sat., Sep. 26 — Fri., Oct. 2

Whether you read one book, all five, or one of your own books in between some of our reading selections, I hope this month’s selections give you plenty to think about, and plenty to talk about with us.

ℹ️ HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR READING SCHEDULE

This book club is designed to fit your personal reading pace and schedule.

Here’s an overview of the suggested reading schedule options to choose from, to make joining this book club fit into your existing schedule and reading goals. Though you can, of course, always read whatever you want, however you want, whenever you want!

Feel free to adjust the option you want to follow based on whatever you’re reading outside the club, as well as what we’re reading and covering that month in other posts. There is no ‘right’ way to read with us, only the way that works best for you and your life in any given week or month.

👥OPTION 1: One Book Per Week Reader

Read with us week-by-week by reading one book per week. This schedule will align best with Tuesday’s check-in posts, in which we’ll cover our initial thoughts on the book we’re reading for that week and introduce any questions and topics worth exploring further as we continue reading the book.

This option is best for those who want to take their time exploring and discussing each work in tandem with the focus of other posts and conversations happening on Daily Drafts & Dialogues.

📚OPTION 2: The Poly Mood Reader

Weave all five books together throughout the month so that you can read two or more books at the same time while still staying close to the sequence of discussions we’ll have about each book on Tuesdays.

This is a great option if you want to alternate between denser prose and faster-paced plots in the same week, listen to one book on audio while reading another in print, or simply follow your reading mood from day to day.

It offers greater flexibility while still allowing you to join the weekly discussions by meeting the weekly benchmarks.

☀️OPTION 3: Daily Page Goal Reader

Keep a steady reading rhythm across the full 35-day reading period by following a daily page goal.

Because this month’s five-book stack is approximately 2,192 pages in the editions used for the estimates in this post, completing the entire stack in 35 days works out to roughly 63 pages per day. Your actual page count will vary by edition, font, format, and reading medium, so think of 60–65 pages per day as a guide rather than a rule.

This option is great if you just want to set your reading stack in the order you want to read each book and focus on the number of pages you read each day. It is also great for those who are building a reading routine, as well as those who already have an allotted hour or so dedicated to reading each day— those who read with their morning coffee, right before bed, or during their lunch hour or while they commute by train or bus or carshare most days.

⏳OPTION 4: One Book Per Month Reader

Choose just one specific book to read at a slower pace over the entire month with us.

This option is especially good for building a reading routine that will stick, or for readers who have several other books they want to read over the course of the month. You can choose the book that interests you the most and use the weekly targets below to give yourself plenty of room to read, reflect, reread, and participate in your selected book’s discussion.

🗣️ How to Join Book Discussions

You are welcome to tackle the entire list or jump into book discussions for individual picks.

👥 Each book selection will have a Buddy Read available. All Buddy Reads will be hosted in the StoryGraph app. This Buddy Read feature helps ensure you don’t encounter spoilers and never feel rushed, so you can read at your own pace.

Every Buddy Read will remain accessible in StoryGraph past its designated end date as long as you join it in the app before its designated end date—the end of our September reading cycle on Friday, October 2. This means you can continue logging your thoughts and chatting about the book at your own pace, no matter which reading schedule you choose or whether you’re following the Tuesday check-in posts here on Daily Drafts & Dialogues.

💬 You’ll also have the opportunity to discuss each book in the comments of Tuesday check-in posts and in chat threads in upcoming Daily Drafts & Dialogues Books posts.

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📚 OUR 5 MAIN SELECTIONS FOR SEPTEMBER: THE STORIES WE CARRY

🌟 Week 1: 📕 Popular Pick: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

🌟 Week 2: 📗 Real World Application Pick: Educated by Tara Westover

🌟 Week 3: 📘 Diverse Perspectives Pick: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

🌟 Week 4: 📙 Literary Dive Pick: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

🌟 Week 5: 📖 BONUS Pick: The Book of Love by Kelly Link

📅 SEPTEMBER READING SCHEDULE OPTIONS

👥 OPTION 1: The Weekly Buddy Read Schedule for Tuesday Reading Notes and Check-Ins

Use this reading schedule if you want to read all five books, one book at a time, one book per week.

Every Tuesday, a dedicated community check-in post will go live to complement that week’s main selection, featuring reading notes and discussion questions for a deeper look at that book’s specific angle on The Stories We Carry.

A note about page counts: Page counts below use readily available U.S. editions as a planning reference. Your edition may have a different page count, so feel free to use chapter/section progress rather than exact page numbers whenever necessary.

📕Week 1: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (~352 pages)

In the aftermath of a devastating pandemic, a traveling troupe of actors and musicians moves through the scattered communities of the Great Lakes region. Moving between the world before the collapse and the world after it, the novel asks what remains worth carrying forward when almost everything familiar is gone.

📆 Daily Target: August 29–September 4 — approximately 50 pages/day to finish in one week.

🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 1

This week’s post will dive into The Books That Change Us. We’ll consider the role books, art, performance, and culture play in helping people remember who they were and imagine who they might become.

💬 Possible Discussion Questions:

What books, stories, performances, or works of art become especially meaningful to the characters after the collapse, and why?
How does Station Eleven suggest that the stories we encounter can change the way we understand our own lives?
What does the novel suggest we should preserve when we can no longer preserve everything?

Station Eleven Buddy Read

📗Week 2: Educated by Tara Westover (~368 pages)

Tara Westover recounts growing up in an isolated survivalist family in rural Idaho without formal schooling before eventually making her way to college and Cambridge University. Her memoir explores the complicated relationship between memory, family, identity, education, and the stories we inherit about ourselves.

📆 Daily Target: September 5–11 — approximately 53 pages/day to finish in one week.

🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 8

This week’s post will dive into Memory & Storytelling. We’ll explore how memory shapes memoirs, how our understanding of the past can change over time, and what happens when different people remember the same history or events differently.

💬 Possible Discussion Questions:

1. How does Westover’s understanding of her childhood change as she gains distance from it?

2. What is the relationship between memory and identity in Educated?

3. When does telling your own story become an act of reclaiming your life?

Educated Buddy Read

📘Week 3: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (~288 pages)

Willis Wu is a background character in a fictional television procedural, perpetually trying to move up the hierarchy of stereotyped roles available to Asian-American actors. Through its inventive screenplay-like structure, the novel examines race, assimilation, family, ambition, and the stories society teaches us about who we are allowed to be.

📆 Daily Target: September 12–18 — approximately 41 pages/day to finish in one week.

🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 15

This week’s post will dive into The Stories We Tell Ourselves. We’ll look at the identities we construct, the roles we perform, and what happens when the story we’ve been given no longer feels big enough to contain us.

💬 Possible Discussion Questions:

What ‘role’ does Willis believe he needs to play in order to be seen or valued?
How does the novel distinguish between the stories we create about ourselves and the stories other people create for us?
What does Interior Chinatown suggest about the possibility (and difficulty) of rewriting an inherited identity?

Interior Chinatown Buddy Read

📙Week 4: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (~544 pages)

After the mysterious death of her sister Laura, Iris Chase reflects on her family’s history, her own life, and the manuscript Laura left behind. The novel layers memoir, family history, romance, political history, and a story-within-a-story to explore the distance between what happened, what is remembered, and what is told.

📆 Daily Target: September 19–25 — approximately 78 pages/day to finish in one week.

🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 22

This week’s post will dive into The Stories We Tell Others. We’ll examine unreliable narrators, secrets, omissions, storytelling as power, and the ways people reshape the past when they tell it to someone else.

💬 Possible Discussion Questions:

Who gets to tell a story in The Blind Assassin, and whose version of events are we asked to trust?
What do the characters conceal from one another, and what does that concealment allow them to control?
How does storytelling become a way of protecting, manipulating, remembering, or reinventing the self?

The Blind Assassin Buddy Read

📖 Week 5: The Book of Love by Kelly Link (~640 pages)

Three teenagers who disappeared, and were presumed dead, return to the small seaside town of Lovesend, Massachusetts, drawn into a supernatural mystery involving magic, death, love, and the balance between worlds. As they try to understand what happened to them, the novel encourages readers to ask questions about what we owe one another and what kinds of stories can survive across time.

📆 Daily Target: September 26–October 2 — approximately 92 pages/day to finish in one week.

🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 29

This week’s post will dive into What Makes a Story Last? We’ll consider why certain stories stay with us, how stories are transformed when they’re retold, and what makes a narrative feel bigger than the moment in which it was created or encountered.

💬 Possible Discussion Questions:

What makes a story endure in The Book of Love, and what makes certain stories worth carrying forward?
How do love, grief, memory, and imagination influence the stories the characters create?
After reading this month’s selections, what do you think makes a story last?

The Book of Love Buddy Read

📚 OPTION 2: The Month-Long Poly Reader Schedule with Weekly Benchmarks

If you’re reading two or more selections simultaneously but prefer to weave them together over the course of the full month rather than reading one book at a time, aim for these weekly benchmarks:

📕 End of Week 1 — Friday, September 4: Finish Station Eleven

📗 End of Week 2 — Friday, September 11: Finish Educated

📘 End of Week 3 — Friday, September 18: Finish Interior Chinatown

📙 End of Week 4 — Friday, September 25: Finish The Blind Assassin

📖 End of Week 5 — Friday, October 2: Finish The Book of Love

Reminder: The goal with this option isn’t to read only one book each week, but to reach the corresponding benchmark highlighted above by the end of each reading week. This way, if you’d rather read 20 pages of one book in the morning and 40 pages of another at night, you can do what works best for both your schedule and mood!

☀️ OPTION 3: The Daily Reading Schedule

Use this option if you want to finish all five books across our full 35-day reading period while maintaining a steady, structured reading rhythm. Rather than worrying about finishing one book each week, simply aim for your daily page goal and move through the stack in order.

✅ Your Daily Commitment: Aim for approximately 60–65 pages per day across the full stack.

📑 Your Complete Monthly Roadmap:

📕August 29–September 3: Read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

📗September 4–September 9: Move into Educated by Tara Westover

📘September 10–September 14: Continue with Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

📙September 15–September 23: Dive into The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

📖September 24–October 2: Finish the month with The Book of Love by Kelly Link

Reminder: Your goal is to read your daily pages and keep moving forward. If you read more one day and less the next, that’s completely fine. Just think of 60–65 pages as your average daily target rather than a hard rule to keep, especially if it ends up stressing you out.

⏳OPTION 4: The Monthly Schedule (Pick ONE Book for the Whole Month)

Do you want to focus on just one specific book for the entire duration of September that explores The Stories We Carry?

If so, use these relaxed weekly targets to space your chosen book across all five weeks and give yourself plenty of time to unpack all it has to offer.

📕If reading ONLY Station Eleven: Read approximately 70 pages per week (about 10 pages/day).

📗If reading ONLY Educated: Read approximately 74 pages per week (about 11 pages/day).

📘If reading ONLY Interior Chinatown: Read approximately 58 pages per week (about 8 pages/day).

📙If reading ONLY The Blind Assassin: Read approximately 109 pages per week (about 16 pages/day).

📖If reading ONLY The Book of Love: Read approximately 128 pages per week (about 18 pages/day).

Again, this plan is based on the editions referenced above, so use your own edition’s page count if it differs.

🏛️ Library & Reading Notes

There is no prize for finishing all five books, or a penalty for reading only one.

You can read ahead. You can fall behind. You can switch schedules halfway through the month. You can listen to the audiobook versions while reading the ebook versions, annotate every page in your printed copy, read in tiny bursts, or spend an entire afternoon disappearing into one of these books.

However you decide to read with us, the point is not to turn reading into another obligation. It’s to make space for the stories that stay with us.

So, pick the schedule that makes you want to open a book, then come talk to us about what you find there when you can. 📚✨

All book selections should be available through your local library. It will be incredibly rare that we have a book selection that is not available there. So, please support and use your library. That’s what they’re there for— free books! And the lovely librarians there will make it easy for you to get your card if you don’t already have one.

Check your physical library branch for copies of the books we’re reading. Or use the Libby app (which is linked to your library card) to secure your copies or place holds early!

💬Drop a comment below to let us know which reading schedule and book(s) you are choosing this month!

✨Stay tuned for Tuesday’s check-in post, which will include reading notes and discussion questions for Station Eleven. And don’t forget to join The Daily Drafts & Dialogues Book Club in Storygraph so you can join Buddy Reads!

I can’t wait to read with you in September and see how what we’re reading deepens our discussions!

Daily Drafts & Dialogues

Can you write great work without challenging your own beliefs?

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Thanks for joining this week’s dialogue about the stories we tell ourselves!

Cast your vote, then keep reading. You may find yourself agreeing with one answer at first then questioning it at the end, as you continue to engage in reflection and dialogue.

Drafting this Dialogue: Great Writing and Our Beliefs

Yes. Great writing is about your skills.

If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:

To engage in further dialogue, ask:

No. If you don’t change, readers can’t.

If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:

To engage in further dialogue, ask:

My Reflection and an Invitation

Now that we’ve started the dialogue here, I want to hear more about what you think in the Dialoguers Chat!

Continue Exploring September’s Theme, The Stories We Carry

This Week: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Week 2: Memory and Storytelling

ICYM Week 1 Posts: The Books That Changed Us

Go Deeper with Daily Drafters Exclusives

This month: The Stories We Carry Writing Collection

Want to explore past themes? Paid subscribers have access to the full archive, including previous writing prompts, discussions, and reading lists, as well as full access to the Daily Drafters chat and Daily Drafters Exclusives writing collections.

© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

The Vital Glitch

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Prompt: The Glitch

Describe an AI assistant that starts rewriting its user’s digital journal because it detects their self-narrative is completely delusional.

Why did I choose it?

My Response: The Vital Glitch

[Write what comes next, then share what you come up with in a comment or chat reply!]

My Reflection and an Invitation

How about you? What did this prompt or piece of flash fiction surface for you?

Continue Exploring September’s Theme, The Stories We Carry

This Week: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Week 2: Memory and Storytelling

ICYM Week 1 Posts: The Books That Changed Us

Go Deeper with Daily Drafters Exclusives

This month: The Stories We Carry Writing Collection

Want to explore past themes? Paid subscribers have access to the full archive, including previous writing prompts, discussions, and reading lists, as well as full access to the Daily Drafters chat and Daily Drafters Exclusives writing collections.

Writing Prompts that Navigate the Stories We Tell Ourselves

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Welcome to the third week of exploring The Stories We Carry on Daily Drafts & Dialogues

Welcome and thanks for joining us. I’m so glad you’re here!

For week three, we’re turning further inward, navigating those stories and narratives we create and tell ourselves— those stories and narratives we form about our personalities, mistakes, relationships, fears, hopes, limitations, possibilities, etc.

I hope to see what you come up with for one of these prompts in the Drafters Workshop Chat soon too, so we can further discuss the role memory plays in the stories we carry.

General Tips for Every Prompt

Invitation for the Week: Use these prompts to question the stories you tell yourself and notice what becomes possible when a familiar narrative yields to another perspective.

Creative Prompts for Navigating the Stories We Tell Ourselves

1. The Body Graphic

Focus On:

Skills to Practice:

Feeling Stuck?

2. The Glitch

Focus On:

Skills to Practice:

Feeling Stuck?

3. The Return

Focus On:

Skills to Practice:

Feeling Stuck?

4. The Inherited House

Focus On:

Skills to Practice:

Feeling Stuck?

5. The Silent Film

Focus On:

Skills to Practice:

Feeling Stuck?

Reflective Journaling Prompts for Navigating the Stories We Tell Ourselves

6. The Soundtrack

Focus On:

Skills to Practice:

Feeling Stuck?

7. The Expiration Date

Focus On: